IDW

An obvious thing for a series like Star Trek: Year Four to do would be to take some of Star Trek‘s familiar motifs and refine them a bit. It doesn’t necessarily have to “update” them for “a modern audience” because that’s such an overused and cliched expression, but it can sometimes be helpful to give a little nod to the fact that, say, this series is being written in 2007 instead on 1969. And, with its second issue, Year Four does pretty much that: This story is very much like what I’d expect Star Trek in 2007 to look like.

Or, perhaps more accurately, what Star Trek made against the cultural and political backdrop of 2007 would look like. On a pit stop to Aarak 3, one of the Federation’s largest suppliers of Dilithium crystals in the galaxy, the Enterprise crew has the briefest of moments to reflect on how different the planet is since the Federation signed a mining agreement with the local government before they are attacked by a group of terrorists who try to blow the place up with a handheld explosive. The terrorists are part of a resistance group known as The Traditionalists, who feel Aarak’s alliance with the Federation is a betrayal of their culture’s fundamental beliefs, in particular the belief that Dilithium is a magickal substance and that in mining and selling it, the ruling classes are draining the planet’s spiritual essence. This leads to a minor Prime Directive debate, as while supporting the aristocracy to secure the Dilithium would constitute interfering, the Traditionalists hold that the Federation has already violated the Prime Directive by giving one side the technology needed to turn it into a mining superpower.

So there’s more to discuss in this story than there was last time, but let’s first address the two things that predictably made me upset right from the get-go. First of all, yes, it is exceedingly difficult for me not to immediately side with the Traditionalists. Stand-ins for an indigenous populace angry that their culture is being stripped away from them due to the encroachment of material and ideological Westernism? Yeah, sign me up. There’s no way I’m not going to be sympathetic to that. There’s also the little matter of the Dilithium crystals being sacred totems, which the story painfully glosses over. Spock makes a comment about how “there is nothing magical about a matter-antimatter reaction” that absolutely rubs me the wrong way, and no real effort is made to make up for this. Kirk stops Spock from being even more offensive and later there’s a scene where Scotty describes how “magical” it is to bring life to his engines, but that’s a cop-out, isn’t it? That’s the smarmy, substanceless Disney version of magic. That’s not spiritual and symbolic power, that’s something you put on a mass-market greeting card that you sell for $5 at a tourist kiosk.

I mean, Star Trek wasn’t always great at magick to be sure, especially early on. There were a frankly appalling number of stories where the Enterprise crew waltzed in to tell people how backwards, superstitious and primitive they were.…

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It is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, eminently logical that one of IDW’s first projects upon acquiring the license would be Star Trek: Year Four, a miniseries set in the uncertain missing period between “Turnabout Intruder” and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Fans have always found the Original Series to be irritatingly unfinished, what with Captain Kirk declaring that the Enterprise is on a “five-year mission” and all, and only three seasons of actual, extent television to watch. It’s also a particular itch that’s been with Star Trek for quite some time: It was certainly present as comparatively far back as 1992, as we saw with Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rights. Arguably, we can trace it back even as far as the late-1970s and the New Voyages series, though, as we mentioned back then, that was a slightly different scenario.

But really this is predominantly a concern for now, in 2007. For a thing like Star Trek: Year Four from IDW to exist, a number of things had to happen. We first needed to see Star Trek become once again a mainstream phenomenon and aggressively court its cultish, proto-Nerd Culture fanbase, swiftly ensuring that Star Trek was once again very much no longer a mainstream phenomenon. Then we had to let the franchise lie fallow for a few years before reviving the tie-in comic side of it as we kill time before that oft-rumoured new movie will hopefully make our franchise great again. And IDW, a company essentially built around catering towards Nerd Culture interests, or things that, through neglect, have become exclusively Nerd Culture interests (it’s very telling one of their marquee titles is a Transformers book), was really the only publisher that could have picked up Star Trek at this point.

And so we get a Star Trek series with a very Nerd Culture agenda: Tie off those annoying loose ends from that bit of the franchise that was canceled so it gets a proper ending and observes proper Aristotelian narrative structure and also ensuring no new stories can ever be told in that series again, because if its one thing Nerds hate more than their favourite show getting canceled prematurely, it’s having their favourite show continue, but without their explicit approval and permission.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself. IDW’s Nerd Culture inklings most certainly do catch up with it, but this is most obvious in this miniseries’ sequel series (how apropos) Star Trek: Final Mission. What we have with Year Four at first is really an attempt to revive a specific storytelling structure and formula, because while we’ve had twenty-five seasons of Star Trek since it, we’ve never really had an overt revival or reconstruction of the Original Series (despite how hard Rick Berman and Jeri Taylor may have tried at times with Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise). And I will give the creative team on this series credit, that’s precisely what “Year Four, Issue Number 1” (which obnoxiously doesn’t have any other title) feels like.…

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